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Third Report of theNational Performance Review

COMMON SENSEGOVERNMENTWORKS BETTER&COSTSLESS

Vice President Al Gore

COMMON SENSEGOVERNMENTWORKS BETTER&COSTSLESS

Third Report of theNational Performance Review

Vice President Al Gore

Common Sense GovernmentWorks Better and Costs Less

Vice President Al GoreThird Report of the National Performance Review

Introduction.................................................................................................1

Calling in the Real Experts............................................................................1

There’s a Wrong Way and a Right Way .........................................................2

Reclaiming Government “For the People”.....................................................2

Delivering the Goods at Last.........................................................................6

It’s Never Finished.........................................................................................6

1. A Government That Makes Sense........................................11

The Real Business of Government ..............................................................12

Americans Want a Government That Works Better, Costs Less...................13

Why We Have a Federal Government.........................................................14

How Things Got Out of Hand ...................................................................16

Failing to Change With a Changing World.................................................16

Going By the Book .....................................................................................18

Re-creating Common Sense Government ...................................................20

Notes ..........................................................................................................21

2. Getting Results ..................................................................................25

Results, Not Rules.......................................................................................27

What Americans Want: Fewer Rules, More Sense .......................................28It’s Not So Much the “What” as the “How” .......................................28Get Rid of Bad Rules and Make Good Ones Easier to Understand....29Make It Easier for Us to Do What Needs to Be Done .......................32Assume We’re Honest, Not Dishonest; Intelligent, Not Stupid ..........33

The Results: Working Better and Costing Less ...........................................34Progress Report: Cutting Obsolete Regulations, Pointless Paperwork .....36Progress Report: Rewarding Results, Not Red Tape............................39Progress Report: Getting Out of Washington, Creating Partnerships.....41Progress Report: Negotiating, Not Dictating ......................................45

The Road Ahead .........................................................................................46

Notes ..........................................................................................................47

Contents

3. Putting Customers First ..............................................................49

The Service Revolution ...............................................................................51

What Americans Say Good Service Means ..................................................52Ask Us What We Want ......................................................................52Don’t Tell Us “That’s Not My Department”.......................................53Treat Us With Courtesy, Respect . . . and Enthusiasm .......................54Make It Easy ......................................................................................55Provide Reliable, Timely Help ............................................................55

The Results: A Government That Serves.....................................................56Progress Report: Asking and Listening ...............................................57Progress Report: Establishing Customer Service Standards .................59Progress Report: Benchmarking the Best in Business..........................59Progress Report: Using Technology to Serve Customers Better...........62Progress Report: Measuring and Rewarding Service............................62

The Road Ahead .........................................................................................65

Notes ..........................................................................................................67

4. Getting Our Money’s Worth ....................................................71

What Americans Want: A Businesslike Government ...................................71Stop Doing Unnecessary Things.........................................................72Buy Smart ..........................................................................................75Hold Government Accountable..........................................................75

The Results: A Smaller, Better, Faster, Cheaper Government ......................75Progress Report: Reducing, Eliminating, Spinning Off Programs.......77Progress Report: Using Best Management Practices............................80Progress Report: Measuring and Benchmarking the Best in Business..82Progress Report: Partnering With Business .........................................83Progress Report: Selling Obsolete Inventory.......................................84

The Road Ahead .........................................................................................85More Measurement, More Accountability ..........................................85More Competition, More Privatization ..............................................86

Notes ..........................................................................................................87

5. Conclusion............................................................................................91

Making “Good Enough for Government Work” Mean “Best”––Again .......91

A Matter of Trust ........................................................................................92

Personal Responsibility................................................................................93

Notes ..........................................................................................................93

AppendicesA. Status of Major Recommendations by Agency........................................95

B. Status of Major Recommendations Affecting Governmental Systems ...109

C. New Recommendations by Agency ......................................................119

D. Regulatory Reform Efforts ...................................................................141

E. Summary of Savings to Date ................................................................149

F. Presidential and Congressional Actions Taken .......................................153

NPR Products and Resources ......................................................159

Vice President Gore presents last year’s statusreport on the National Performance Review toPresident Clinton, September 14, 1994.

People said it couldn’t be done. When President Bill Clinton announced inMarch 1993 that “the federal government is broken and we intend to fix it,”the old hands in Washington, D.C., shook their heads. You’ll never fix the

federal government, they said. Been there, done that, doesn’t work.When he announced a governmentwide initiative to “reinvent government”

called the National Performance Review, the skeptics raised a collective eyebrow.And six months later, when the National Performance Review’s first report—

From Red Tape to Results: Creating a Government that Works Better and Costs Less, theblueprint for reinvention—was published, they sighed, “Another report for the shelf.”

But they didn’t count on the experts President Clinton called in to run the show.

Calling in the Real ExpertsIf you want to make a real change, you have to engage the people most likely

to be affected—the ones who are already involved and who have the most at stakein getting the job done right. You have to seek their advice and give them the powerto fix what they—more than anyone else—know needs fixing.

The bigwigs who said the federal government couldn’t be reinvented hadnever talked to the real experts. When they said it couldn’t be done, they didn’tcount on the folks who had been wanting the chance to do things right for years,the folks who had been trapped between the needs of the American people and therigidity of the government bureaucracy.

• They didn’t count on Bill Freeman, the Occupational Health and SafetyAdministration’s man in Maine. Freeman’s inspection team won awardafter award for finding and fining worker safety violations, yet he knewinjury rates weren’t improving. So he sat down with the companies with themost injuries, and negotiated agreements that would really work. Now, thecompanies’ own workers are finding and fixing 14 times as many hazards as Freeman’s people could have found. Worker injuries are dropping, andit’s costing less.

• They didn’t count on Bob Molino, director of procurement for the DefenseLogistics Agency. Molino got fed up with 700-page specifications for

Introduction

REINVENTING GOVERNMENT: A HISTORY

On March 3, 1993, PresidentBill Clinton asked Vice PresidentAl Gore to lead the NationalPerformance Review, a campaignto reinvent the federal govern-ment. Milestones:

• September 7, 1993, VicePresident Gore presents 384recommendations in the reportFrom Red Tape To Results:Creating a Government ThatWorks Better and Costs Less.

• September 14, 1994, first yearStatus Report published.

• September 20, 1994, PuttingCustomers First: Standards forServing the American Peoplepublished—the government’sfirst-ever customer service stan-dards.

• September 7, 1995, publica-tion of Common SenseGovernment: Works Better andCosts Less, describing theimpact of reinvention on theAmerican people and theirgovernment and presentingmore than 300 new recom-mendations.

chocolate chip cookies, massive and costly inventories of unused supplieslanguishing in government warehouses, and a rigid and senseless system ofsealed bids for selecting suppliers. He keelhauled the whole system. NowDefense buys many of its supplies from normal commercial suppliers likeeveryone else does. And it’s using an electronic purchasing system so sim-ple and inexpensive that other agencies are asking Defense to handle theirpurchases too.

• They didn’t count on Neil Jacobs, of the Immigration and NaturalizationService in Dallas. Jacobs decided it was crazy to surround a factory andarrest and deport immigrants with fraudulent papers. This only crippledthe business that had unknowingly hired them—and the workers them-selves simply returned a few weeks later. Now, Jacobs meets with the busi-ness owner, arranges for legal replacement workers at the same wages, andthen deports the illegal immigrants—protecting the business and filling thevacancies the illegal immigrants might try to come back to claim. At last,business owners feel helped, not harassed.

Don’t believe it? Then believe the Ford Foundation and John F. KennedySchool of Government at Harvard, which named these and other federal reinven-tion initiatives as finalists for the prestigious Innovations in American Governmentawards this year.

There’s a Wrong Way and a Right WaySure, people have tried to reform the federal government before—almost a

dozen times this century, and almost always unsuccessfully. But most of these earli-er attempts went nowhere because they were done backwards: from the top downinstead of the bottom up. They didn’t ask for ideas from the American public—orfrom the federal government’s own front-line workers, who try to serve the publicevery day. Most often, the efforts consisted of studies led by outsiders with no realstake in the results.

Doomed from the start, they failed. It could hardly have been otherwise.As frustration with the federal government has mounted, some people,

including many in Congress, have decided that the way to fix government is just toeliminate as much of it as possible. That might help bring the budget into line—orit might do no more than shift around a lot of organizational “boxes.” Much of thegovernment would then simply continue operating as it always had.

The main problem with taking an axe to the federal government is that itwon’t fix what remains. Government would be smaller, but it would still be asinflexible and bureaucratic. Cutting may treat a couple of symptoms, but it won’tcure the disease.

Reclaiming Government “For the People”Americans are frustrated, irritated, confused, even angry about our govern-

ment—about the cost, and the hassle, and the inflexible rules, and the uncoopera-tive attitude. But we’re even angrier that our great dream seems to be slipping

Common Sense Government: Works Better & Costs Less2

3Introduction

REINVENTION AT A GLANCE

Reinvention Is Well Under Way

• Agencies have completed nearly one-third of NPR’s original recommendations; of the remainder, nearly all are well under way.

• More than 200 agencies have published customer service standards.

• Agencies have created nearly 200 “reinvention labs” to test newapproaches to business.

• The President has issued 30 directives to implement NPR recom-mendations.

• Agencies have formed more than 400 labor-management partnerships withtheir unions.

Government Costs Less

• $58 billion of NPR’s $108 billion in savings proposed in 1993 are alreadylocked in.

• $4 billion in NPR-related savings are pending before Congress.

• $46 billion in savings are still to come, based on 1993 proposals.

• Agencies have put in place $10 billion in reinvention savings beyond therecommendations made in the original 1993 report.

• Federal employment has dropped more than 160,000; reductions arenearly a full year ahead of schedule.

• More than 180 new recommendations will result in an additional $70billion in savings over the next five years.

Government Is Becoming Less Intrusive

• Agencies are sending 16,000 pages of obsolete regulations to the scrapheap, of 86,000 pages of regulations reviewed.

• Agencies are reworking another 31,000 pages of regulations.

• Regulatory and administrative burdens on the public will be reduced bynearly $28 billion.

• Attitudes are changing; in many cases, fines will be waived for honestmistakes.

• Agencies are closing more than 2,000 field offices.

Congress Is Helping

• Congress has enacted 36 NPR-related laws, including the biggest pro-curement streamlining bill ever, with a second in progress.

• Congress has passed 66 of the 280 NPR items requiring legislation (24 percent).

• Nearly 70 NPR-related bills are currently pending in Congress.

• Congress has held more than 120 hearings on various NPR recom-mendations.

away—the dream of a government that is “of the people, by the people, and for thepeople,” a government that isn’t “them” but “us.” And we don’t want to give up onthat dream. It is what set us apart from the rest of human history nearly 220 years


REPORT AT A GLANCE

A Government That Makes Sense

America was born angry at government nearly 220 years ago, and we’re nodifferent today. The less government there is, the more we like it—until disasterstrikes, or we lose our job, or need medical care we can’t afford. Then we want gov-ernment to be there for us, and quickly.

For years, Americans had been complaining their government was in theirface, not on their side. That was then. This is now: throughout government, front-line workers are asking their customers what they need, instead of telling them.They are beginning to manage the work of the people like the best in business.Federal Agencies are actually getting fan mail. Social Security’s “800” number israted better than L.L. Bean’s for customer service.

Along the way, government is getting smaller. As a result of actions taken onrecommendations made in 1993, there are more than 160,000 fewer federal work-ers than when President Clinton and Vice President Gore took office. It is becom-ing smaller daily. Savings totaling $58 billion are locked in. Another $50 billionare on the way.

Americans have waited a long time for a government that makes more sense.Out of frustration, some have proposed scrapping large portions of it. But thisisn’t what the people say they want. Polls show Americans are angered less by whatgovernment does than by how it goes about its business. We want it better man-aged. We want it to use common sense.

Getting Results

People want to do the right thing. Problem is, the government makes italmost impossible to figure out what the right thing is. So President Clinton chal-lenged federal agencies earlier this year to overhaul in 100 days the way the gov-ernment regulates people and businesses—by focusing on results, not red tape.

He asked agencies to assume people are honest, not dishonest, and intelli-gent, not stupid. He asked that rules be written in plain language and that obso-lete rules be dropped. He asked that agencies get out of Washington, create part-nerships with those being regulated, and negotiate, not dictate. As a result, of the86,000 pages of federal regulations reviewed so far, 16,000 pages of obsolete reg-ulations are headed for the scrap heap. Another 31,000 are being reworked.Agencies held more than 300 meetings around the country and identified 40instances where negotiating made sense. Agencies are beginning to evaluate theiremployees’ performance based on results, like reduced worker injuries, and not onthe number of fines or penalties assessed. In the process, they are reducing regula-tory and administrative burdens on the public by nearly $28 billion.

Putting Customers First

Last year, in many cases for the first time, federal agencies asked their cus-tomers what they wanted and how they defined good service. They used these

ago, when we declared independence from England, and it’s what we stand forthroughout the world today.

And while the great debate continues over what government should do, weknow what basics we expect to get: protection from enemies here and abroad, clean

5Introduction

results to develop customer service standards. Then more than 200 agencies didsomething most businesses don’t do—they published their standards and distrib-uted them to their customers. Just recently, agencies surveyed their customers tofind out how well the government is living up to those standards, and they will usethe responses to improve service even more. In addition, several agencies are com-paring their operations to the best in business—and increasingly are beating them.

Getting Our Money’s Worth

Obsolete government programs and waste drive Americans crazy—after all,it’s their money. Since the reinventing government initiative began in 1993, theClinton Administration has proposed eliminating more than 400 obsolete pro-grams and is in the process of closing more than 2,000 unnecessary field offices.

But that wasn’t enough. President Clinton asked Vice President Gore tolaunch a new effort to identify additional programs that could be reinvented, ter-minated, privatized, or sold. He identified nearly $70 billion in new savings. TheEnergy Department will sell the Naval Petroleum and Oil Shale Reserves. TheOffice of Personnel Management has privatized its training operations. TheDepartment of Housing and Urban Development will consolidate its 60 programsinto four, Congress willing. The Department of Transportation plans to shrink its10 agencies into three. And more.

In addition, to better manage its business, the government is beginning tomeasure what matters. Government must be accountable every day, not just everyfour years at the election booth. As a result, the President is signing performanceagreements with his major agency heads. All agencies are developing measures ofperformance. And by 1998, the federal government will have its first financialstatement. Americans will soon know for the first time whether they are gettingwhat they pay for.

Conclusion

At the turn of the century, the phrase “good enough for government work”meant the best. Now it is a term of derision—much like the phrase “made inJapan” meant cheap and shoddy just two decades ago. Now “made in Japan” is asign of the best there is in many product categories. With the hard work of feder-al employees, the phrase “good enough for government work” will mean the same.Already in many instances, government isn’t just fixed, it’s the best. SocialSecurity’s toll-free number is the best. The Air Combat Command’s pharmacy isthe best. The Consumer Product Safety Commission’s hotline is the best. BusinessWeek, Newsweek, the New York Times, and Financial World have noticed. For thefirst time, the Ford Foundation and the Kennedy School of Government willmake prestigious awards to several federal agencies for their innovations.

If you haven’t felt a difference yet, you will. This year. Many of the initia-tives begun this past year are being expanded nationwide. The federal governmentwill regain the faith of the American people, says President Clinton, “one customerat a time.”

air and water, food that’s safe to eat and toys that are safe for our kids to play with,help in emergencies, safe workplaces, and so on. We don’t want to get rid of gov-ernment; we want it to work better and cost less. We want it to make sense.

And we’re pretty clear about what common-sense government means:


• It means a government that focuses on results, that moves heaven andearth to make it easy for all of us––citizens, businesses, and state and localgovernments––to meet the nation’s common goals, instead of burying usin rules and punishing us when we can’t figure out how to comply.

• It means a government that recognizes that we are its customers, workswith us to understand our needs, and puts us first, not last.

• And it means getting our money’s worth—a government that works bet-ter, faster, and cheaper than in the past, one that operates as well as, or bet-ter than, the best private businesses.

Delivering the Goods At LastFor two years, quietly but persistently, thousands of ordinary Americans—

Americans who happen to work for the federal government—have been striving tochange dramatically what the government does and how it does it. And folks whokeep tabs on things—Business Week, Newsweek, The New York Times, and others—have been taking notice.

The New York Times calls it the “quiet revolution.” It’s pick-and-shovelwork—hard, often tedious, but crucial. The plain fact is that if you want to changesomething big in a big way, you can’t get by with a little light landscaping and acoat of paint. You have to excavate and renovate. And you can’t do it overnight.

And progress is everywhere around us. In 1993, the Administrationannounced a goal to save $108 billion and cut 252,000 government jobs—espe-cially administrative jobs that don’t serve people directly—in five years. (Congressand the President later raised this last goal to 272,900.) Both tasks are ahead ofschedule: savings locked into place total $58 billion (53 percent of the goal), andjob reductions total more than 160,000 (60 percent of the goal). Of the 1,250 rec-ommendations in the 1993 blueprint, 379 (30 percent) have been implemented,214 (17 percent) require legislative action, and 657 (53 percent) are still in thepipeline. The Administration recently developed more than 180 additional rec-ommendations that, when implemented, will result in $70 billion in new savingsover the next five years. These savings have already been incorporated in PresidentClinton’s balanced budget proposal.

In addition, President Clinton has issued 30 reinvention directives on cus-tomer service, agency streamlining, procurement reform, labor-management rela-tions, cooperation and partnerships with state and local governments, paperworkreduction, and regulatory reform, among others. And Congress has passed 36 lawsto implement reinvention recommendations.

This report, Common Sense Government: Works Better and Costs Less, is a reportto the American people on the progress of the “quiet revolution” to reinvent the fed-eral government—what it is, how it’s going, and what it means for ordinary folks.

It’s Never FinishedThey said it couldn’t be done…and it isn’t.Reinventing the federal government isn’t an event. It isn’t an Act of Congress

7Introduction

REINVENTION ROLLS ON!In 1995 NPR worked with agencies to develop more than 180 new recommendations forimproving agency programs and serving customers better. Some highlights of the recommen-dations include:

Consolidate Operations

• Consolidate servicing of USDA’s $30 billion single-family housing loan portfolio andclose some county offices to save $250 million.

• Realign Small Business Administration operations to save $122 million and improveservice by increasing public-private partnerships.

• Eliminate a layer of management in the Department of Health and Human Servicesby combining the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health with the Office ofthe Secretary.

• Merge the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry with the Centers forDisease Control and Prevention.

Give Customers a Choice

• Shift HUD public housing funding directly to tenants, who can determine wherethey want live.

• Pay Department of Labor job training grants directly to workers rather than passingfunds through states or private contractors.

Increase Local Control

• Increase the State role in the Superfund Program and decrease EPA’s role, saving $283million.

• Shift control of transportation-related spending from the Department ofTransportation to the states.

Cancellations/Terminations

• Eliminate Commerce’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Corps,saving $35 million.

• Shave $1.2 billion over five years from Energy’s applied research programs, ending theClean Coal Technology Program.

• Eliminate Interior’s Office of Territorial and International Affairs, saving $5 million.

• Abolish the Interstate Commerce Commission, saving $129 million.

Adminstrative Changes

• Target Medicare Program abusers in five key states and develop a health care fraudfund to pay for investigations and prosecutions.

• Allow employees at large companies to file for Social Security benefits through theircompany’s personnel office, to save $289 million.

• Improve debt collection practices at Treasury, Labor, and Education to increase rev-enues by more than $1 billion.

Privatization

• Convert Connie Lee from a government corporation to a fully privatized entity.

• Shift NASA’s space craft communications to private sources to save $200 million.

• Convert Sallie Mae from a government corporation to a fully privatized entity.


or a Presidential Executive Order. Nor is it something you can accomplish with aswing of the budget axe.

This effort to reinvent government, part of the ongoing National PerformanceReview, is becoming a way of life for employees in agencies and the customers theyserve across the nation. It’s like the job of painting the Golden Gate Bridge in SanFrancisco. The story goes that the task is so huge that by the time the painters getto the far end of the bridge, it’s time to go back to the beginning and start again. Itnever stops. It’s never “finished.”

The world has become more complex, and so has our government. Yet evenas the government has become more complicated, it has been slow to adapt to realchanges in the world—particularly those changes driven by advances in technologyand communication. Along the way, the government has become distant from thepeople it is supposed to serve and, occasionally, lost touch with what it was createdto do nearly 220 years ago. Our nation began with a solemn covenant: that the gov-ernment that we were establishing would be the people’s servant—not their master.

We need to renew that covenant for the next century. That’s what reinventinggovernment is all about.

YOU ARE OUR CUSTOMER.If you’ve felt a difference, let us know. If you haven’t, let us know that, too.

Write to: Vice President Al GoreReinventing GovernmentWashington, DC 20501

President Clinton announces OSHA reforms at Stromberg Metal Works,Washington, D.C., May 16, 1995.

America was born angry at government. We were so sick of the EnglishCrown treating us like, well, colonies, that we did what no career counselortoday would recommend: we quit colonialism before we had something

else lined up. We weren’t entirely sure what we wanted—indeed, we argued amongourselves about it at length—but we knew what we didn’t want, and that was to bejerked around by a distant and insensitive government.

We’re no different today.And today, once again, we feel our government has become distant and insen-

sitive—not to mention too big, too meddlesome, and too costly. We don’t muchcare whether it’s a problem of politicians, issues, or government agencies—or evenif it’s federal, state, or local. It’s just a problem. A big one.

Distrust of government is buried deep in America’s genetic code. For morethan two centuries, wave after wave of people who have been harassed or abused bytheir governments have seen this country as a last refuge, a haven: persecuted FrenchHuguenots and Cambodians, Irish famine survivors and Salvadoran refugees, peo-ple fleeing Nazi Germany and Somalia. Our ancestors’ distrust of authority isdeeply ingrained in our national character. Take a close look at your birth certifi-cate. Down in the fine print—after “Citizen: U.S.; Birthplace: Peoria; Eyes: brown;Blood type: B positive”—it says, “Attitude: Distrusts government.” If it’s not there,it should be: it’s who we are.

The less government there is, the more we like it…Until the earth cracks open in California and people’s lives crack with it. Until

the rains keep raining in the heartland and people’s achievements and memories dis-appear in a swirl of angry brown water. Until a river becomes so polluted that itcatches fire. Until a child dies from a contaminated hamburger. Or until we lose ajob, need help feeding our family, grow old and can’t afford medical care for ourinfirmities, or become victimized on our own neighborhood streets. Then we wantthat government to be there for us, and quickly.

Chapter 1

A Government That Makes SenseIn framing a government…you must first enable [it] to control thegoverned; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

James MadisonThe Federalist, No. 40 (1787)


The Real Business of GovernmentThe call came in to the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the Federal

Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) at 9:30 a.m. on Wednesday, April 19,1995. Twenty-eight minutes earlier, at 9:02 a.m., a bomb had exploded in front ofthe Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing scores of govern-ment workers and the citizens they serve, and injuring hundreds more. Now TomFeuerborne, director of the state’s Civil Emergency Management Department, wason the line asking for help.

A couple of years earlier he would have been told that his governor needed to file a written request for federal emergency assistance and mail it to Washington. No longer. Four and a half hours after Feuerborne’s call, at 2:05 p.m., FEMA’sadvance team got there, complete with damage assessors. At 8:10 p.m., James LeeWitt, FEMA’s director, arrived to personally coordinate the federal response. Witt had been a state emergency services director himself and he knew the drill. By2:30 a.m., FEMA’s own search and rescue teams were on the scene to help the city’sfire department.1

Meanwhile, the federal agencies whose Oklahoma offices were shut downwere working furiously to restore services for their customers throughout the region.Within hours of the blast, the Social Security Administration had arranged for itsDallas office to provide services to the citizens the Oklahoma City office served. GSA was setting up temporary office locations all over the city so federal agenciescould restore their services to the public. By the next day, the Department of Labor

was issuing apprenticeship certifications out of anemployee’s home, so that construction workers’ paywould be uninterrupted. The U.S. Marine CorpsRecruitment office was keeping appointments in a newlocation. The Federal Highway Administration wasoperating out of the Federal Aviation Administration’soffices elsewhere in the city. The Department of

Agriculture was issuing health certificates for animals awaiting export to Canada,Japan, and Taiwan so customers did not lose expensive reserved air cargo space.

Oklahoma City reminded America that “the government” isn’t somethingseparate. It is ourselves—our neighbors and friends trying to do their jobs. Thebomb turned these simple acts of service into heroic acts. Yet helping people is whatpeople in the federal government do every day.

At the same time, the event taught us that when it needs to, the governmentcan untangle itself from its own red tape and take care of people’s needs. Quickly.Efficiently. And well.

Can the federal government meet the needs of the American people? Withoutquestion, yes. Does it take a disaster for it to work right? No, it does not.

Rather, it takes a radical rethinking of what government should do, and how.The world has changed, and so have people’s needs and expectations. For years, weAmericans complained that the government hadn’t kept up. Not only wasn’t ourgovernment serving us, we said, it was hindering us—it had become so bogged

Can the federal government meet the needs of the American people? Without question, yes.

It takes a radical rethinking of what governmentshould do and how.

down in process that it had forgotten about its purpose. But the government hadn’tgotten the message.

Now, it has. Throughout the federal government, people are taking their cuefrom the business world and asking customers what their needs are, instead oftelling them. They’re eliminating programs that are obsolete and reforming activi-ties and agencies whose purposes are still relevant. They’re streamlining and simpli-fying regulations. And they’re managing the work of the people’s government likethe best in private business.

Not surprisingly, government is getting smaller. As mentioned earlier, thereare more than 160,000 fewer federal workers today than there were in 1993, whenPresident Clinton took office, and more than 2,000 offices are being closed. Andthat’s just the beginning.

Along the way, government is also getting better. Federal agencies are actual-ly getting fan mail. The Post Office is guaranteeing counter service within five min-utes in many places around the country. The Customs Service is clearing passengersand cargo even before planes land and ships dock.

Americans Want a Government that Works Better,Costs Less

Americans have waited a long time for a government that makes more sense.Out of frustration, some—including some Members of Congress—have proposedscrapping large pieces of the system. That would be dramatic, if nothing else.

But it turns out that isn’t what people want at all:

• A 1993 poll asked people whether they would prefer a candidate who would“cut the federal bureaucracy by 20 percent” or one who would “change theway government does things—cut bureaucracy, make government more effi-cient, and give ordinary people better service and more choices.” People over-whelmingly chose the latter—no matter whether they had voted for BillClinton, Ross Perot, or George Bush in the 1992 elections.2

• In a 1994 poll, after the mid-term elections, voters were asked whether it wasmost important to make government “smaller so it will cost and do less” or“more efficient so it delivers more services for less money,” among other choic-es. Only 25 percent chose the first option; 51 percent chose the second.3

• Half of the respondents in a January 1995 Business Week/Harris poll saidthe federal government “mainly needs fine-tuning to make it more flexible,accountable, and user-friendly.” And 44 percent said it “needs to undergothe same kind of dramatic restructuring and downsizing that is taking placein the private sector.”4

• Based on a survey they conducted together in March 1995, Democrat poll-ster Peter Hart and Republican pollster Robert Teeter concluded that astrong majority of Americans want more effective government and believethis can be accomplished through better management.5

13A Government That Makes Sense

In other words, Americans don’t want the guillotine for our government. We want intensive care. Says David Osborne, co-author of the best-sellerReinventing Government:

Voters want smaller government, yes, but they also want government thatworks. They want a government that narrows the deficit, creates economicgrowth, improves the schools, reduces crime, protects the environment, andhelps them find the opportunities they need to succeed. They want a moreefficient government, but they are desperate for a more effective government.6

The bipartisan Hart/Teeter poll found that Americans still want the federalgovernment to have primary responsibility for things like controlling immigration,helping the needy, improving education, reducing crime, and preventing air andwater pollution. Surprisingly, we even think the government, not private industry,should have primary responsibility for improving jobs and the economy.7

At the same time, Americans also think this work should be shared with oth-ers. We think that state governments would be better than the federal governmentat running some of these programs, though we expect the federal government to setstandards and follow up. We think individuals and community leaders bear impor-tant responsibilities in meeting our national goals. And we think the business com-munity should be consulted more.

In short, Americans don’t like big government much, and we want less of itwherever possible. Yet we also expect much from our government and have highaspirations for it. And when something personal or threatening—or both—hitshome, we want our government there for us.

Why We Have a Federal GovenmentIt is January 1991. On your way to work at Eastern Airlines’ headquarters in

Miami you pick up the Miami Herald and discover that your job’s gone—Easternhas just gone belly-up. This comes as no surprise to you; you’ve worked for Easternmost of your adult life, and everybody’s known the company’s been drowning in redink for years. Bankruptcy has been in the air for months. The surprise comes a few

days later, when you discover that your pension’s gonebelly-up too.

When both Eastern Airlines and Pan AmericanWorld Airways folded in 1991, the pensions of tens ofthousands of people who had worked for these compa-nies evaporated overnight. Luckily for them, a smallgovernment organization called the Pension Benefit

Guaranty Corporation stepped in to rescue them. Unluckily for the American tax-payer, however, the rescue cost more than a billion dollars, and the agency—like anyother creditor—was able to retrieve from the bankrupt companies only pennies onthe dollar. This wasn’t an isolated incident, either. The pension agency now admin-isters more than 2,000 terminated pension plans for more than 450,000 people.

Frustrated with their inability to head off such disasters before they happened,and under pressure from Congress because of the growing cost of these termina-


Americans don’t like big government much, and we want less of it wherever possible. But wealso expect much from our government and have

high aspirations for it.

tions, the folks at the pension agency decided there had to be a better way. Theycreated an “Early Warning Program” that permitted them to monitor the 400largest and most troubled pension programs and negotiate with the companiesinvolved, so that pensioners’ interests were protected before a company took anyaction that might terminate the pension fund.

Corporations responded. In the last two years, the pension agency has nego-tiated agreements covering more than 1 million American workers and retirees andproviding more than $13 billion in pension protection. The new approach is work-ing better and costing less—much less. And it’s helped to change the relationshipbetween the government and industry from adversarial to cooperative. When theGeneral Motors Corporation, whose pension program was underfunded, proposedto sell off its highly profitable Electronic Data Services subsidiary, it didn’t wait forthe pension agency to call; it called first. The company agreed to set aside $10 bil-lion in cash and stock to help protect the pensions of more than 600,000 workersand retirees—in advance.

You’ve probably never heard of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation.With any luck at all, you’ll never need to. But if the company you work for startsplaying fast and loose with your pension fund, you’ll be glad it’s on top of the case.It’s what you expect from your government, after all: to protect you when you can’tprotect yourself.

When the United States was first created, the federal government didn’t havemuch to do. The framers of the Constitution planned for the national governmentto take care of national defense and foreign relations, define citizenship and protectthe borders, regulate interstate commerce, create a postal service, and safeguardindividual rights. Everything else would be handled by the states. In 1800, therewere only a handful of federal departments. They were run by a secretary and a fewclerks and, in one or two instances, a small field structure. There were no bureaus,no middle managers, few specialists.8 The country was small; things were simple.

But time, experience, and our own changing expectations gradually broadenedthe scope of the government’s responsibilities. When the people needed protectionfrom the abuses of monopolies in the late 1800s, they turned to the federal govern-ment. When the nation needed help out of the Great Depression in the 1930s, thefederal government shouldered the task, creating programs to stabilize and strength-en the economy and help people in need. The international imperatives of World WarII, the Cold War, and global leadership gave the federal government much broaderresponsibilities in national defense, trade, and foreign affairs than the ConstitutionalConvention could ever have contemplated. And a wide array of issues—pollution,poverty, and racial injustice, to name a few—became federal responsibilities becausethey could not be solved by states acting on their own. And so, with each passing year,the federal government did more and more of the people’s work.

For a long while, Americans liked what they got from the federal government.They trusted it to do the right thing and to do it well. In 1963, more than three-quarters of all Americans said they believed the federal government did the rightthing most of the time.

But today that figure has dropped to less than 20 percent.9 Many of us don’trespect our government anymore; we resent it. We don’t feel protected by our gov-


ernment; we feel hassled by it. We don’t feel served by our government; we feel suf-focated by it. A government that was supposed to preserve our liberties seems benton proscribing them at every turn. And, to add insult to injury, the whole thingcosts way too much.

How Things Got Out of HandIt’s said that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. There may be no

better illustration than the U.S. federal government.For example, to ensure that politicians don’t abuse the public trust and pack

government agencies with their cronies, or that federal bureaucrats don’t treat gov-ernment workers unfairly, the government has created 100,000 pages of laws, exec-utive orders, rules and regulations, and agency directives to cover every conceivablepersonnel decision.10 These were “summarized” in a 10,000-page Federal PersonnelManual, finally abandoned last year. If you wanted to hire people for federal jobs,you’d have been wise to choose young applicants; they’d mature while they waitedfor you to go through all the required steps.

To ensure that private businesses don’t rip off the taxpayer when the govern-ment hires them to do the people’s work, the government has created procurementrules—thousands of pages of them—so stupifyingly difficult, time-consuming, andcostly to follow that many good companies won’t even bother to bid. Do you workfor the federal government and need a computer to do your job? Chances are thatby the time you get the model you requested, the technology will be out of date—and you’ll still pay the full retail price.

And to ensure that state and local governments don’t subvert the will ofCongress and use federal dollars the way they think best, the government tied up thefunds and programs with restrictions. The knots are so tight that state and local offi-cials often have no flexibility to meet federal goals in ways that make sense locally.

All in all, the Code of Federal Regulations—the government’s rulebook—isenormous. If you want a copy for your library, you’ll need a shelf 21 feet long.

The reasons for this overgrowth of rules are remarkably simple.11 As a matter ofpolitical philosophy, we moved away from limited government toward an activistgovernment that we expected to serve as both a national “nanny” and a nationalpolice officer. As a matter of governmental practice, we wanted to protect againstcorruption, treat everyone fairly, and safeguard the common interests of the people.So we created rules to make sure the government makes no mistakes, takes no risks,tolerates no uncertainty. The result was galloping bureaucracy and stifling regulation.

We made these decisions. Not some faceless bureaucrat or power-hungrypolitician, but we the people, through our elected officials—presidents, senators,and congressional representatives, Republicans and Democrats alike. And while theworld around us changed, our government stuck steadfastly to the rules—whetherthey made sense anymore or not.

Failing to Change with a Changing WorldIn fact, the proliferation of rules is really only a symptom of the government’s

trouble, not its cause. The basic problem is that the government has plodded alongsingle-mindedly, answering each new question with yet another rule, but failing to



A VACUUM-TUBE GOVERNMENT IN A MICROCHIP WORLD

Twenty years ago, “Pong” was the latest thing in video games. In fact, it was the onlything. Eight-track tapes were the latest thing in music. Fax modems and cellular phones did-n’t exist. Airline travel was a luxury, and the Boeing 707 was the workhorse of the air.

Today, we’ve gone from 707s to 777s that are so technologically advanced that theycan take off, fly, and land virtually on their own. And though they’re bigger than ever,they’re also cleaner and quieter than ever.

Yet while a single aircraft now carries computer systems that rival all the computersthat existed in the world a few decades ago, our air traffic control system—the system thatcontrols all those airplanes—still relies on the technological equivalent of Pong.

In many of the nation’s busiest air traffic control centers, controllers peer at greenradar screens that haven’t changed much since World War II. Technicians nurse alongancient mainframe computers that take up an entire room but have only a fraction of thepower of a modern laptop. Parts of the system run on vacuum tubes, a technology that wasobsolete 30 years ago. And it breaks down—a dozen times this year alone. All told, the sys-tem’s inefficiency costs billions of dollars each year in wasted aircraft fuel, delays, missedconnections, and labor—some $3 billion in imposed costs, according to the airline industry.That’s more than the industry has ever made in profit in a year.

Why aren’t these relics in a museum, instead of controlling the flights of half a billionpassengers a year? Because the Federal Aviation Administration, which runs the air trafficcontrol system, faces a unique and virtually impossible task. Despite the fact that the FAAliterally controls the minute-by-minute activities of one of the country’s flagship industries,it has none of the tools that have made U.S. companies in that industry the world’s best.While the FAA needs to be able to plan for demand a decade or more away, it doesn’t evenknow what its budget will be the next year. Although it has an annual revenue stream ofmore than $5 billion, it can’t leverage one dime, and must pay for all of its equipment in cashand up front. And even with money in hand, the agency faces procurement rules so cumber-some that “new” systems are usually already obsolete by the time they’re brought on-line.

Even so, thanks to the efforts of the Federal Aviation Administration’s dedicated con-trollers, technicians and managers, our air traffic control system is still the safest in theworld. However, growing demand, aging equipment, and shrinking budgets threaten FAA’sability to keep it that way.

When President Clinton took office, he quickly recognized that the status quowouldn’t fly. Under the leadership of Transportation Secretary Federico Peña andAdministrator David Hinson, the FAA overhauled its massive air traffic control modernizationprogram, ensuring that some new equipment will be delivered before the end of this decadeand saving taxpayers an estimated $1.5 billion. In the interim, the agency is taking extraordi-nary steps to maintain the current equipment until the new systems are in place.

Improving hardware and software is still a stopgap measure, however. The real solu-tion would be to fix the underlying cause of the problems. The FAA should be given thesame tools to provide air traffic control services that those who use the system already relyon. That’s exactly what the federal government’s reinvention team has proposed—to create abusinesslike government-owned corporation, funded by user fees and working outside oftraditional governmental constraints.

Vice President Gore and Secretary Peña displayed the FAA’s vacuum tubes over a yearago to dramatize the need for change. The Speaker of the House echoed that call. There isnow growing consensus in Congress on the need for personnel and procurement reform;any serious attempt at reform, though, must also address the financial future of the FAA. Inthe meantime, the airlines and the flying public are stuck in a holding pattern, waiting forthe government to catch up.

recognize that the world around it had gone in a different direction.The middle of this century—when we formed much of our vision of what

government should do and how—was the pinnacle of the Industrial Age. Not sur-prisingly, the model we chose to follow was the great American corporation, wherepolicy was decided by top executives, interpreted by mid-level managers in careful-ly segmented corporate divisions, and carried out by workers divided into narrowspecialties, following detailed work specifications and mass-producing identicalproducts of reliable, if unexceptional, quality.

It was said that “What’s good for General Motors is good for the nation.” Andindeed, that system carried us to almost unimaginable levels of productivity andprosperity.

But by the 1970s, what was once good for General Motors wasn’t even goodfor General Motors anymore. The world had changed. People weren’t willing toaccept “good enough” any more; we wanted the best. We wanted variety, choice,quality, convenience, and service. And with information on almost anything imme-diately accessible to almost anyone, we knew what the best was. Almost overnight,America had gone from a producer economy to a consumer economy—we hadmoved from the Industrial Age to the Information Age.

A lot of major corporations, General Motors included, were slow to respondand struggled to stay in business. Others—companies that were more flexible and

moved more quickly to meet rapid changes in consumerdemands—thrived. Eventually though, even the BigThree automakers turned around. In 1958, for example,you could buy 21 makes of cars from ten car makers; bythe 1990s, you could choose from more than 570 car,van, and truck models.12 What’s more, you could reviewtheir features, get information on their safety, and even

do price comparisons by personal computer in the comfort of your own home. Theconsumer insisted on being in the driver’s seat, and corporations changed accordingly.

But the federal government was still operating on the producer model, not theconsumer model. Decisions were still made at the top, interpreted into rules andregulations by mid-level bureaucrats distant from customers and from each other,and carried out by public employees in narrow line agencies and field offices—whether they made sense or not. Change, if it came at all, came very slowly indeed.

Going By The BookThe federal government has done things the way it has in the past for gener-

ally good reasons. On the taxpayers’ behalf, it wanted to prevent abuse—unfairness,arbitrariness, corruption, willful bias—by its own employees, by companies it hires,and by other governments. It went by the book and demanded that everyone elsedid too.

But the price was high. Certainty was achieved, but in a rapidly changingworld, “certainty” became inflexibility. Fairness was achieved by treating everyoneequally, but in a world full of compelling individual situations, “fairness” becameunresponsiveness. Bias was avoided by making sure local officials and front-line fed-


Almost overnight, America had gone from a producer economy to a consumer economy—we

had moved from the Industrial Age to theInformation Age.

eral employees couldn’t make discretionary decisions—even though they knew bestwhat needed to be done—and by punishing them when they did. The result was asystem that hobbled users and abusers alike, treated adults like children, and madeeveryone a suspect.

It also put the government’s customers—which is to say, all of us—at the bot-tom of the priority list. The first priority was the rules; the second was those whochecked whether the rules were being followed (such asauditors and inspectors general); the third was thosewho made the rules in the first place (such as Congressand interest groups). Customers came last, if at all. Itwas a sort of “iron triangle”—special interests toldCongress what “the people” wanted; Congress passedlaws, and then told the agencies what to do about them.

Citizens, understandably, do not like being low in the pecking order—orworse, being ignored altogether. And honest people—whether public employees orthe people they serve—don’t like being treated like potential criminals. The perverseeffect of “rule by rules” is that instead of reducing arbitrariness it appears to increaseit; instead of fostering cooperation it destroys it; instead of solving problems it wors-ens them, creating bitterness and resentment along the way.

And the costs are enormous. Fragmentation, duplication of effort, and com-plexity run up the cost of everything government does—and everything anyone elsedoes that is regulated by the government. It turns out that fully one-third of theentire non-postal federal workforce simply checks on, audits, and controls otherfederal workers.13

Perhaps even worse, bright and committed people who chose to be public ser-vants find they are not permitted to serve the public. Dedicated folks struggle tooperate within an antiquated system that they know needs changing, and then haveto take the heat when it breaks down.

This might all have been tolerable if the government were effective at doingwhat it does. But there’s the rub; despite the red tape, the irritations, the wastedtime, and the incredible cost, the federal government wasn’t getting the job done.Often it seemed like it didn’t even remember what the job was in the first place. AsPhilip K. Howard, author of The Death of Common Sense, put it, “We seem to haveachieved the worst of both worlds: a system of regulation that goes too far while italso does too little.”14 He could easily have said the same of the government as awhole, not just regulation.

Over the years, gradually but relentlessly, the distance between the people andthe government has grown—when the whole idea in the first place was that the peo-ple and the government should be one and the same thing. As former SupremeCourt Justice William Brennan once pointed out, “The characteristic complaint ofour time seems to be not that government provides no reasons, but that its reasonsoften seem remote from human beings who must live with the consequences.”15

Perhaps the most compelling challenge we face as a nation as the next centu-ry dawns is how to redeem the promise of self-government—how to make our gov-ernment make sense again.


Perhaps the most compelling challenge we faceas the next century dawns is how to redeem thepromise of self-government—how to make our

government make sense again.


Re-creating Common Sense GovernmentLet’s say you’re out driving one day and your car suddenly stops. You check

the obvious things—the gas gauge, the temperature gauge—but that doesn’t help.If you want to get to the bottom of the problem, you’re going to have to look underthe hood.

Then, you have three options. You can close it again and hope the problemwill go away. This will keep your hands clean, but it won’t get you anywhere. Oryou can start yanking out pieces of equipment. This will make the car lighter andeasier to push, but the chances are it won’t make it run. Or you can try fixing what’sbroken—maybe several things. The only way to find out which things, however, isto examine the engine closely. Maybe consult an expert or two. Do a diagnosis.Experiment a bit. The disadvantage of this option, of course, is that it takes longerthan simply ripping out equipment. The advantage is that it will get you where youwant to go.

Some things are obvious. Some government programs are obsolete, or justplain silly, and can be eliminated. Over the years we’ve been pretty good at creatingprograms to solve new problems, but lousy at eliminating old ones.

In addition, some workforces are bloated and can be cut. Some field offices areno longer needed and can be closed. You can slim downthe government “from the get-go.” That’s where the fed-eral government’s reinvention drive began: with the obvi-ous—and there are more obvious things yet to do.

But “downsizing,” as they call it in the businessworld, isn’t enough. Just like any business, any govern-

ment function that has been around a few decades needs to be re-thought. If it isn’t,it loses touch with its original purpose—and with the needs of the times. It alsobecomes uncontrollable. As President Clinton has noted:

We know we have to go beyond cutting, even beyond restructuring, to com-pletely reevaluate what the federal government is doing. Are we doing itwell? Should we be doing it at all? Should someone else be doing it? Are webeing as innovative and flexible as the most creative private organizationsin the country?16

There is a point at which program and budget cuts fly just as much in the faceof common sense as business as usual. As debate rages in Congress over which agen-cies or programs to cut to reduce the size and influence of the federal government,it’s worth noting that when a patient has a systemic disease—say, a debilitatinginfection—a good doctor doesn’t lop off the patient’s arms and legs. For one thing,all that does is weaken the patient further. More importantly, it does absolutelynothing to cure the disease.

The federal government is ailing and needs a cure. It needs to be treated sys-temically, not amputated or—less drastic, but no more effective—dabbed withsome dubious topical salve. Even if the wholesale elimination of federal agenciesand programs was what Americans wanted—and it is not—that approach would donothing to improve what is left.

Just like any business, any government function that has been around a few decades needs

to be re-thought.

A Government That Makes Sense 21

Americans are quite clear about what common sense government means. Itmeans a government that focuses on results, that moves heaven and earth to makeit easy for citizens, businesses, and state and local governments to meet the nation’scommon goals. It means a government that recognizes who its real customers are,works with them to understand their needs, and puts them first, not last. And itmeans giving taxpayers their money’s worth—a government that works better,faster, and cheaper than in the past, one that operates as well as, or better than, thebest private businesses.

It means a government that works for us, not against us. It means a govern-ment that is in our corner, not in our face. Real cures tend to be a lot less dramat-ic than lopping limbs or ripping out machinery. They take time. Progress can beuneven. But in the case of reinventing the federal government, there is progress, andit’s real.

Let’s face it, this is the way things should have been all along. If you’re a citi-zen, you ought to be able to expect good service from your government. If you runa business, you ought to be able to expect reasonable treatment by regulators—treatment that meets legitimate public needs without crushing yours. And as a tax-payer, you ought to be able to expect that the government, acting as your trustee, ismanaging your tax dollars wisely. And the federal government shouldn’t expectapplause when it finally straightens things out to give the American people this kindof treatment.

But the point is, this has never happened before. Despite 11 major exercisesin government reform this century, there’s been little lasting change.

Until now.

Notes1. Daniel Franklin, “The FEMA Phoenix: How one federal agency rose

from the ashes to become a symbol of what government can do,” TheWashington Monthly, July/August 1995, p. 42.

2. David Osborne, “Can This President Be Saved?” The Washington PostMagazine, January 8, 1995, p. 14.

3. Osborne, p. 14.

4. “Are Americans Really That Angry?” Business Week, January 23, 1995, p. 41.

5. Report of Peter Hart/Robert Teeter poll conducted for the Council onExcellence in Government, April 12, 1995.

6. Osborne, p. 14.

7. Hart/Teeter poll.

8. Russell M. Linden, Seamless Government: A Practical Guide to Re-Engineering in the Public Sector (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers,1994), p. 29.

9. Alice M. Rivlin, Director, Office of Management and Budget, testimony before the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, May 17, 1995.


10. Estimate by the Office of Management and Budget in Al Gore, FromRed Tape to Results: Creating a Government That Works Better and CostsLess (New York: Plume/Penguin Books, 1993), p. 1.

11. Michael Kelly, “Rip It Up,” The New Yorker, January 23, 1995, p. 32.

12. Linden, p. 11.

13. Linden, p. 42.

14. Philip K. Howard, The Death of Common Sense: How the Law isSuffocating America (New York: Random House, 1995), p. 11.

15. Howard, p. 9.

16. Bill Clinton, remarks at Reinventing Government event, FCC AuctionOffice, Washington, D.C., March 27, 1995.

President Clinton and Vice President Gore displayfederal regulations that were eliminated as part of thegovernment’s regulatory reform efforts, at the WhiteHouse Conference on Small Business, June 12, 1995.

It is August 1, 1995, and Skowhegan, Maine, is baking in heat seldom experi-enced that far north. In a huge white tent set up a few miles out of town at theS.D. Warren Company paper plant, 600 people—workers and managers from

firms across the state—swelter in their seats, listening to the featured speaker. He isBill Freeman, area director of what has been, for industry at least, perhaps the mostthoroughly disliked of all federal agencies: the Occupational Safety and HealthAdministration, or OSHA.

As Freeman concludes his remarks, all 600 rise to their feet in a single motion.They do not boo him. They do not stone him. They cheer loudly, applaudenthusiastically.

Freeman has not always received this sort of greeting from the companies heinspects. A few years ago, Bill Freeman and his team of two dozen inspectors wereOSHA’s “gold medal” winners. They got the agency’s top honors for detecting themost safety violations, issuing the most citations, and levying the most fines—sortof the triple jump in the OSHA Olympics.

But Freeman didn’t think he and his team were winning at all. OSHA’s goldmedal notwithstanding, he was convinced they were losing—losing, that is, in theserious business of reducing the number of work-related injuries in Maine. Mainehad the worst record in the nation before Freeman’s team got its medal, and it stillhad the worst record afterward. The fact was that, given the limited resources he hadand the complexity of OSHA’s inspection regulations, his chances of actuallyimproving Maine’s injury rate were virtually nil under existing rules.

Following those rules, Freeman’s inspectors would move into a company, spendthree months on-site, another three months preparing reports, and then anywherefrom six months to two years in court. And when all was said and done, they’d findthemselves telling the company to do the same things they’d told them years beforeafter an earlier inspection. The process was so cumbersome that it got in its own way,not just the companies’ way; in seven years, Freeman’s team had been able to inspectonly five mills. Indeed, nationwide OSHA has only 2,000 inspectors to monitor thenation’s 6.2 million workplaces—more than 3,000 per inspector.2

Chapter 2

Getting ResultsIt is common sense to take a method and try it; if it fails, admit itfrankly and try another. But above all, try something.

Franklin D. Roosevelt1

Fed up with getting nowhere, Freeman went to the 200 companies that hadthe highest injury rates in the state and offered them a deal: you and your workersdraw up a safety program that meets the law’s objectives, and we’ll stop playing“Gotcha!” No more months-long “wall-to-wall” inspections, no more “ignorance isno excuse” enforcement, no more by-the-book fines. We’ll stop being cops. We’ll bepartners instead—you, your workers, and OSHA. And any time you need help,we’ll be there.

Industry’s response was immediate and positive. All but two of the 200 signedup. Employer/worker safety teams in the participatingfirms are identifying—and fixing—14 times more haz-ards than OSHA’s inspectors ever could have found,including hazards for which the agency didn’t even haveregulations. After all, who knows where the problemsare better than the workers themselves?

The new program is working so well that in two years, the group’s injury ratesdropped 35 percent.3 Says S.D. Warren’s Carl Turner, “There is a direct connectionbetween the 200 Program and the drop in the accident rate; we spent 18 yearsunder the old OSHA program and nothing happened.”

More remarkably, Warren’s production is up 25 percent, and Warren execu-tives believe it’s because their employees feel valued now. “This makes a big differ-ence in how employees feel about the company,” says one union official. “Repairingsafety items would take forever, if you were lucky; now when I write a repair orderit’s done in less than 24 hours. We should have done this ten years ago.”

The initiative has brought unions and management together as well. Says anofficial at Georgia Pacific, “We have joint communications and meet together; Inever thought I’d see the day.” And the effect goes beyond the factory floor. EdWarren at Boise Cascade says employees are “using safety glasses and earplugs whenthey use a chain saw at home.”


Employer/worker safety teams are identifying—andfixing—14 times more hazards than OSHA’s

inspectors ever could have found.

Overhauling Federal Regulations

55%Eliminated

or Revised

16,000

Pages Eliminated

Pages Simplified/Revised

Pages Retained

31,000

39,000

In another time, Bill Freeman probably would have been fired. He broke therules. He didn’t “go by the book.” In another time, if you did something different,stepped out of bounds, bent the rules, or acted on the basis of simple common sense,you’d be punished, not rewarded. In short, if you stuck your neck out, you’d get yourhead cut off. Not surprisingly, people learned not to stick their necks out. Not exact-ly a way to motivate folks. And a lousy way to run anything, especially a government.

But Freeman seized on the federal initiative to reinvent government andpushed it hard. Result?—not another empty “goldmedal,” but an award for the agency from the VicePresident, a substantial financial award from the FordFoundation/John F. Kennedy School of GovernmentInnovations in American Government program, anannouncement by President Clinton that “Maine 200”will henceforth be OSHA’s policy nationwide—andinjury rates in Maine that are already down by morethan a third.

Freeman and his team are real winners at last.

Results, Not RulesFranklin D. Roosevelt’s message to the government

was, in effect: do something; if that doesn’t work, dosomething else. Over the years, however, the message tofront-line federal workers—and, for that matter, to the people and companies theyregulated—mutated so profoundly it reversed upon itself. It became, “Do it thisway. If that doesn’t work, do it this way anyway. Don’t get any bright ideas.”

Our own government had become a mine field—for employees and their cus-tomers alike. Even if we picked our way through it carefully, following the map wewere given, there was always a chance—often a good chance—we’d stumble upon anew mine. They seemed to grow of their own accord. Good, honest, hard-workingpeople ended up sideways with their government, often not so much because theywere off track but because there was no way to know which way was the right way.Each time they thought they’d figured it out, the map would change.

People want to do the right thing. Problem is, the government often makes italmost impossible to figure out what the right thing is and, once you’ve figured itout, impossible to actually do it. Think of it this way: most folks understand whythere is a speed limit, respect it, and try to obey. But what if the speed limit wasn’tposted or, if it was, it changed so often you never knew whether you were obeyingit, and troopers were forever pulling you over and giving you tickets for violatingthis ever-changing, often mysterious speed limit? And then, just to keep you onyour toes, they’d give you a ticket for your car being dirty, leaving you wonderingwhat that had to do with highway safety. Not only would you be pretty steamedbut, chances are, the highways would be in chaos. That’s what life with the federalgovernment’s been like for years, especially for America’s businesses.

In February 1995, President Clinton put the challenge facing the federal gov-ernment simply. The issue, he said, was “How do we do our part to protect the legit-

27Getting Results

Unless you’ve ever seen one of those huge metalstamping machines come down on a piece

of sheet metal, you can’t imagine what it waslike to think about the days when people

had to put their hands under those machineswith no guards, knowing one mistake would mean the hand would be gone forever. Unlessyou’ve actually seen things like that, it is hard

to visualize what is at stake here.President ClintonMay 16, 1995

imate interests of the American people, without literally taking leave of our sensesand doing things that drive people up the wall but don’t make them safer?”4 And thenhe provided the answer: completely overhaul the way the federal government regu-lates people, businesses, and state and local governments—focus on results, not rules.

What Americans Want: Fewer Rules, More SenseThere’s an old saying that describes how our government works: “The

President proposes, the Congress disposes.” To that, the American people mightadd, “and the agency imposes.” It is those myriad everyday bureaucratic impositionsAmericans want fixed. And that’s what the regulatory overhaul begun by the

National Performance Review is designed to do. PresidentClinton’s message to federal agencies was simple: “We arenot asking people to spend their time, their money, andtheir resources fooling around with us if they don’t haveto and there is no public purpose served by it.”5

In what has become a hallmark of the reinventioninitiative, this year’s efforts at regulatory reform beganwith asking and listening to the people who know most

what needs to be done: the government’s customers and the front-line workers whoserve them. Agencies held more than 300 meetings around the country. Plus, therewere hundreds more local meetings as part of the 1995 White House Conferenceon Small Business. Here’s what people said.

It’s Not So Much the “What” as the “How”We all want clean air and water. We all want safe food and toys our children

won’t be hurt playing with. We want workplaces that don’t injure us. We want oursavings protected. And much more. That’s why we have laws. And while we mayhave our disagreements about some laws, the real problem is what happens after thelaws are passed.

Actually, there are four problems. First, Congress passes laws, but seldomrepeals them—whether or not they’re relevant anymore, whether or not they work.So an awful lot of laws remain on the books after they are no longer useful. Second,after laws are passed the agencies responsible for carrying them out are required toproduce regulations describing how they will achieve what Congress passed the lawto do. But between Congress’s vagueness and agencies’ mania for covering everyeventuality, the result has been regulatory overflow: at last count, the total numberof pages in the Code of Federal Regulations—the encyclopedia of federal laws andrules—was more than 130,000 pages. Its 202 volumes take up 21 feet of shelf space.Third, even after the regulations are approved, there are legions of lawyers and oth-ers who seek out and find loopholes in them, and legions more of agency regulatorswho seek to fill those holes with—you guessed it—more regulations. Fourth,agency employees are duty-bound to enforce regulations once they’re approved.That’s their job. Common sense interpretation is expressly forbidden.

Americans acknowledge that many laws and regulations have made thingsbetter. The environment is dramatically cleaner now than it was 25 years ago.Highways and cars are safer. So are kids’ toys. Even though the number of people


Do we need more common sense and fairness in our regulations? You bet we do.

President ClintonJanuary 24, 1995

working has grown substantially, the rate of work-related fatalities declined morethan 50 percent since OSHA was created in 1970.

But Americans also say that many regulations have created more problemsthan they solved and even frustrated the very goals they set out to achieve. They saythe regulations are often incomprehensible and sometimes simply nonsensical. Andeven when their purposes make sense, the enforcement procedures are often inflex-ible and costly. Sometimes the rules miss the point altogether, like requiring a refin-ery to install $31 million worth of equipment in waste pipes to control benzenewhen, in fact, its benzene emissions came from its barge-loading dock.6

In addition, the punishments for violations sometimes far exceed the viola-tions themselves, not to mention common sense, like fining a company thousandsof dollars for failing to require workers to don hard hats as they rushed to save a co-worker from a collapsed trench.7 And complex and costly regulations are causingemployers to shy away from doing things they want to do, like employing the dis-abled or providing health and pension benefits—things the laws are supposed to bepromoting.

What we end up with, as President Clinton has pointed out, is a governmentthat is obsessed with procedures but often seems oblivious to results. What’s more,all this regulation is immensely expensive—hundreds of billions of dollars, soexpensive that no one really knows the figure. It’s costly to taxpayers to pay for thesystem that creates and enforces all these rules; it’s costly to employers, state andlocal governments, and ordinary citizens to comply with them; and it increases thecosts of products and services.

And then there is the matter of human judgment. After all, regulations don’tthink. In the pursuit of equal treatment of everyone, we have created a system thatdemands that one size fit all, and in the pursuit of certainty we have created a sys-tem that attempts to cover every eventuality, spellingeverything out in excruciating detail. We have given nei-ther the regulators nor the regulated any leeway. In thewords of Philip Howard, we have “exiled human judg-ment.”8 But the world is neither all one size nor all thatcertain. Things change constantly, conditions vary, andhuman judgment is crucial to making things work. Or,as Howard puts it, “Decision making must be transferred from words on a page topeople on the spot.”9

And that’s exactly what Americans want—reasonable rules, reasonably appliedby people close to the action. The new OSHA is proof that the “how” of govern-ment regulation can be changed dramatically for the better. But it isn’t the onlyexample. Throughout government, regulators have begun work on programs tocooperate with the industries they regulate.

Americans deserve a government that works. They’re starting to get one.

Get Rid of Bad Rules and Make Good Ones Easier to UnderstandSome years ago, someone in the federal government decided doctors should

be required to fill out and sign an “attestation form”—sort of a truth oath—attest-ing to the accuracy of the information they provided to the hospital when they dis-

29Getting Results

Decision making must be transferred from words ona page to people on the spot.

Philip K. HowardThe Death of Common Sense

charged a Medicare patient. It didn’t add anything to patient care—in fact, itdetracted, since filling it out took time away from patients. And it didn’t improvemedical records; the doctors were already providing all the information required fordischarging patients, generally quite accurately. What it did do was create more than11 million forms, take up 200,000 hours of physician time, and add $22,500 inadministrative costs for every hospital in the country.

And now, thanks to President Clinton’s reinvention initiative, it’s gone. It’sone of literally thousands of senseless regulations that people, businesses, and stateand local governments don’t have to follow anymore now that the federal govern-ment is focusing on results rather than rules. Are silly regulations all gone? Hardly.Is all that costly paperwork a thing of the past? Not yet. But agencies are killing badregulations faster than at any other time in recent history— thousands of pages ofthem this year alone. And they’re working hard to make good regulations better,easier to understand, and easier to observe.

But in the meantime, how do businesses find out which regulations apply tothem? And how do they make sense of them? In the past they usually found outwhen it was too late: after being hit with some violation.

Now there’s the U.S. Business Advisor—a one-stop Internet shop for infor-mation on regulations and compliance for businesses. A reinvention project of 15major federal agencies, the Business Advisor is a World Wide Web site(http://www.business.gov), housed at the Department of Commerce, through

which businesses can find out what regulations apply to their sit-uation and how to get help complying with them. Lawrence

Livermore National Laboratory and the University ofMassachusetts developed a technology that is remarkably

user-friendly. All you do is tell the system what your questionis and it culls the answers you’re looking for from thousandsof pages of regulations—in seconds. And that’s just thebeginning; soon the Business Advisor will make it possiblefor businesses to get not just regulatory information butalso information on trade, labor, finance, and selling to

the government. Eventually, you may be able not onlyto retrieve information, but also find out about bestpractices, send comments, and file documents withthe government electronically. But these are just the

government’s ideas. The final design will bebased upon input and ideas from businesspeople.

President Clinton has created a task force to getthese ideas and report back with a design by the

end of 1995.Better access to the right information will make it eas-

ier for businesses and others to do the right thing, but only if theinformation they receive is written in plain language. And let’s face it; most

of the time it isn’t. Between the vagueness of the original laws and the legalese usedby rule-writers trying to cover every eventuality, reading regulations is like wadingthrough a jungle without a machete. Now, however, the government itself is clear-


Cutting red tape

in cyberspace

WASHINGTON—The federal government and

businesses can now link on the Internet.

President Clinton today unveils a computer-

based information service called the U.S. Business

Advisor.

Initially, it will offer a Regulatory Assistance

Center with information on regulations and

compliance. Eventually, users will be able to get

information on trade, labor, financial issu

es, envi-

ronmental data and other topics.

USA Today, June 14, 1995. Reprinted with permission.

Copyright 1995, USA Today.

U. S. B U S I N E S S

ADV I S OR

31Getting Results

ing the path, gradually making regulations user-friendly: Interior Department staff,for example, reasoned that if they wrote clearer regulations, people would waste lesstime trying to figure out what the government wanted, would be less likely to makemistakes, and would be more likely to comply. Now, all regulation-writers atInterior use plain language.

The Forest Service has gone one step better: to help make the government’slands and resources more accessible to Americans with disabilities, it has scrappeddetailed and convoluted design and engineering regulations in favor of an award-winning guidebook, “Universal Access to Outdoor Recreation.”

Not every effort to make things clear is that easy, however. Take the Securitiesand Exchange Commission. When it comes to covering every eventuality, perhapsno agency has worked harder than the SEC, created in the 1930s to protectinvestors from fraud in the financial world. SEC’s strategy has been simple: themore people know about what they’re buying, the better they’ll be able to judge therisks involved. So disclosure is crucial. The result of this simple strategy, however,has been anything but simple. As the mutual fund industry has evolved and invest-ment strategies have changed, mutual fund prospectuses have grown too, as SECrequires more and more information to be disclosed. The result? The more infor-mation you get, the less you know. The average prospectus runs to 25 dense pagesof legalistic prose that almost nobody understands.

Now that’s changed. SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt, Jr., decided to have mutu-al fund prospectuses “speak a new language: the English language.”10 Working withthe SEC, eight of the largest mutual fund companies crafted brief, plain Englishsummary documents to help people know what they’re buying. They are testing

what they did to make sure it works. If it does, all mutual funds will use summarydocuments and investors will know what they are buying.

Make It Easier for Us to Do What Needs to Be DoneIf you want someone to do something, it’s generally wise to make it easy for

them. At least that’s the message Americans have been trying to send to the gov-ernment. The truth is that most businesspeople, like most other people, are morethan willing to work to find ways of achieving the public purposes laws are meantto achieve, if they can find a way to do it easily. What they hate is being required tofill out hundreds of forms—especially when they know nobody reads them. Whatthey hate even more is being pounced on by their own government.

New regulations are created every year. Businesses, big and small, are expect-ed to know all the regulations that pertain to them. As far as the law is concerned,ignorance is no excuse. But for years, instead of helping, the government not onlymade it difficult to understand the rules, it made it difficult for companies to com-ply with them (by making them complex, obscure, or simply impractical). Then itpounced, levying fines on any who didn’t comply. Sort of a “Catch-22.” Lawyersand consultants have made fortunes advising businesses about these rules; they’reprobably the principal beneficiaries of government regulation.

In February 1995, President Clinton told the agencies to end the Catch-22s.In March, he gave all regulatory agencies permission to waive up to 100 percent ofpunitive fines so a businessperson who acts in good faith can fix the problem, notfight with the enforcer. The focus is on the objective, not the fines.

Let’s return to OSHA. For decades, the old OSHA’s inspectors would sweepinto your company and start writing up violations of regulations—big ones, littleones, important ones, petty ones—often for things the employers had never heardof (and sometimes for things that didn’t seem to have too much bearing on actualworker safety). Then they’d sweep out again, leaving behind the bill. You’d thinkthey were there to make money, not to preserve safety. Not surprisingly, businesses—especially small businesses—were furious.

Now, however, OSHA has increased its emphasis on providing employers con-fidential consulting services to help them improve working conditions for theiremployees. Instead of playing “gotcha,” they’ll help you evaluate your workplace (andencourage you to involve your workers in the process). They’ll help you draw up asafety plan. They’ll listen to your side of the story—being student as well as teacher—so they can understand your needs and conditions better. They’ll provide training foryour employees—on site. And when everything’s said and done, you may be exemptfrom inspections for a year. No hassles. And the consulting services are free.

Even the inspections are changing. It used to be that any employer who didn’thave an OSHA compliance poster on the wall immediately got slapped with a$400 fine; now inspectors carry posters with them when they visit and help employ-ers put them up.

In fact, the whole issue of fines is changing. A month after President Clintonreleased From Red Tape to Results: Creating a Government that Works Better and CostsLess—the first “reinventing government” report—in 1993, the OSHA office inParsippany, New Jersey, saw it as an opportunity to change how it handled fines for


safety violations. The way the old process worked, if a safety problem was identifiedthe employer had no incentive to fix it until months later, after the reports werecompleted and the litigation was over. The folks in Parsippany thought that waspointless, so they made a deal with employers: fix the problem now, and we’ll reducethe fines by an amount equal to the cost of the safety repair. Since then, immediateabatements of violations have risen by nearly a third and the cost of OSHA follow-ups has dropped. On July 1, 1995, OSHA made this “Quick Fix” initiative its pol-icy nationwide. The point is to make it easy to improve the workplace—and also tomake government work better and cost less.

Other federal agencies are making it easier too. For example, both the CoastGuard and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have shifted toissuing warnings rather than fines for boaters, fishing vessels, and others cited forminor violations of regulations. In addition, the Coast Guard now has a “pollutionticket” program that offers significantly lower penalties for first- and second-timeviolations of pollution standards. The Federal Highway Administration now impos-es penalties only as a last resort, and scales what penalties it does levy to the com-pany’s ability to pay. The Environmental Protection Agency will give small busi-nesses a six-month grace period to correct pollution violations.

Assume We’re Honest, Not Dishonest; Intelligent, Not StupidSometimes, federal regulations and the way they’re enforced give you the

impression the government thinks everyone’s crooked. Or that we’re stupid—thatunless the government spells out how to go about doing something we’ll never fig-ure out how to do it on our own.

We shouldn’t feel bad. For years, government has treated itsown employees the same way—assuming, for example, that thepeople responsible for the national defense cannot be trusted tobuy paper clips without defrauding the United States, ordetailing exactly how employees should handle every situa-tion, as if they couldn’t work it out themselves. If you thinkyou have to fill out a lot of forms, you should see what the gov-ernment makes its own employees go through for even the mostinsignificant purchase or action. This lack of trust in its own employees is onereason why doing almost anything in the government has always required a coupleof dozen signatures: to be sure no one was cheating the taxpayer. Of course theprocess sometimes cost more than what was protected, but at least no one could beblamed if something went wrong.

But people—in government or out—are, for the most part, neither crookednor stupid. Most people want to do the right thing, so long as the right thing makessense. Perhaps the most important thing about the reinvention initiative, and itsregulatory reform work in particular, is that it is based on a new assumption: thatpeople are honest and that if you tell people what needs to be done, and let themget on with doing it, the chances are it will be done better—and more cheaply—than if you tell them how. Moreover, it values them as human beings.

What Americans—individuals, businesspeople, officials from state and localgovernment—told the federal government when they were asked how the burden

33Getting Results

OSHA to cut back on penalties

in exchange for cooperation

Dallas Morning News, May 16,1995. Reprinted with permission.

of regulation could be lifted was remarkable. They did not say, “Get rid of regula-tions.” Their answer was sophisticated and practical at the same time. It was: “Getrid of obsolete or silly regulations, and then work with us to improve those regula-tions that must remain. Trust us. Treat us like partners, not enemies.”

For several years now, the Environmental Protection Agency has been doingprecisely that, in a program that demonstrates the value of making your objectiveclear and trusting people to do it right. EPA identified 17 high-priority chemicalsand told industry that it wanted their release into the environment reduced by 33percent by 1992 and 50 percent by the end of this year. Then it stood aside, askingonly for a simple letter from industries involved explaining how they would reachthose goals. Even the choice of chemicals was sensible; they were chemicals heavilyused by industry, that posed significant environmental concerns, and that had a rea-sonably high likelihood of being reduced through industry action.

Individual companies have responded with remarkable enthusiasm—and notjust major corporations. AB&I Pipe Coating in Oakland, California, for example,spent three years developing a plan that will actually eliminate completely its releaseof chlorinated solvents by this year, along with some 90 percent of emissions of theother volatile organic compounds it uses in its business. Nationwide, the resultshave exceeded the most optimistic projections. Some 1,200 companies are partici-pating. They reduced emissions more than 100 million pounds beyond the 1992 tar-get, and the 1995 goal appears to have been achieved at least a year ago (the dataare still being analyzed). And the spirit of the initiative has been infectious; EPAnow has several other voluntary partnership programs underway and even moreplanned. The formula is simple: focus on results. Less “gotcha” enforcement, plusmore trust, minus mountains of paperwork, equals a lot less pollution.

The Results: Working Better and Costing LessHarley is a potbellied pig. He also happens to be very good at sniffing out

drugs. In fact, the police in Portland, Oregon, think he is even better than a dog intracking down narcotics on the city’s streets. And he sure is a great mascot for anti-drug programs aimed at school kids. The kids love Harley.

Harley has been such a success that the Portland police want to buy somemore potbellies, and to train them to detect guns as well as drugs. The whole pro-ject would cost about $25,000. But so far they haven’t found any federal anti-drugmoney available for training pigs. Dogs, yes. Pigs, no. Never mind that Harley getsthe right results—that he finds the drugs and charms the kids.

When the White House found out that Harley was denied training fundsbecause he was a pig, it acted swiftly—and designated Harley an honorary dog. Itwas a comical response to a ludicrous problem—the kind of problem Americanscan expect to be fixed, and fixed for good, as the government strips away layers ofregulations and mountains of useless paperwork.

The Code of Federal Regulations, the government’s rulebook, is a lot like youruncle’s garage: crammed to the rafters with all sorts of stuff that’s been there for whoknows how long. There’s stuff of great value in there. There’s stuff you don’t needanymore. And there’s stuff you can’t imagine ever having needed. On February 21,


35Getting Results

1995, President Clinton sent the federal regulatory agencies in to clean up UncleSam’s garage. By June 1, they had come up with 16,000 pages of regulations to haulout to the curb.

Then they went back in to find more. So far, they’ve rummaged around inmore than 86,000 pages of regulations. Besides the 16,000 they are trashing, theyare cleaning up another 31,000 more pages—stuff that’s still valuable but needed tobe refurbished. And there’s still more, further back in the shadows, that they haven’tgotten to yet. It’s a very big garage.

President Clinton’s instructions to the clean-up crew were simple:

1. Cut obsolete regulations and fix the rest. Conduct a page-by-page review;eliminate what’s outdated and reform what’s still needed. Figure out howthe goals can be achieved in more efficient, less intrusive ways, and whileyou’re at it, look for ways to push authority down to where it will be usedbest, like in state and local governments.

2. Reward results, not red tape. Change how you measure performance so thatyou focus on results, not process and punishment. Say what you want toachieve clearly and re- engineer your organizations so that people and pro-grams are evaluated on the basis of outcomes.

3.Get out of Washington. Talk to your front-line employees and your customersabout how best to achieve your goals; form partnerships.

Joel

Dav

is,T

he O

rego

nian

Portland, Oregon’s drug-sniffing “honorary dog,” Harley.

4. Negotiate, don’t dictate. Tell people what you want to accomplish and engagethem in working out how to get there. Seek consensus at the very start.

The agencies didn’t do it alone. In the month and a half after PresidentClinton’s order, they held hundreds of meetings with businesses, individuals, andstate and local government officials all over the country to ask them what needed tobe eliminated or fixed. As you might expect, people had plenty of ideas; they’d justbeen waiting for someone to ask.

Progress Report: Cutting Obsolete Regulations, Pointless Paperwork

It’s almost impossible to remember the world before automatic teller machinescame along. If you needed cash, you either had to get to the bank before it closed—in the middle of the afternoon—or go to the supermarket, buy something, and askfor cash back. Now you can get money from your account virtually anytime, any-where. You can even get it overseas. It’s incredibly convenient.

The government, however, didn’t made it very convenient forbanks to set up ATMs. Until this year, the Comptroller of theCurrency, which oversees banking operations, required banks to gothrough a complicated, lengthy, and ultimately costly 35-stepapplication process before they could open up an ATM. Why?Because it treated ATMs as if they were separate bank branch-es, not as extensions of existing ones. Maybe it made sense inthe early days, but it certainly doesn’t anymore. Now, the 35steps are on their way out.

That’s just one, very small example of how much sim-pler life can be with a little common sense. Throughout1995, the major federal regulatory agencies have been cut-ting obsolete regulations and eliminating pointless paper-

work on a wholesale basis:• The Environmental Protection Agency is eliminating 1,400 pages

of obsolete regulations and is revising 9,400 more; that means cuts orchanges to 85 percent of EPA’s rules in the Code of Federal Regulations. Inthe process, it’s also cut paperwork requirements by 25 percent—a savingsfor industry of some 20 million hours of labor a year.

• The Department of Education eliminated 30 percent of its regulations.

• The Department of Housing and Urban Development is cutting 2,800pages—65 percent of all its regulations.

• The U.S. Department of Agriculture dropped 3 million pages of govern-ment forms that America’s farmers filled out each year.

• The Small Business Administration will have eliminated 50 percent of itsregulations by the end of the year and will have revised the rest.

What does this mean on the street? Here’s just one example: 15 years ago,when Mamma Jo’s and Zeno’s Pizza opened in Wichita Falls, Texas, the owners usedan SBA loan to get started. They were grateful for the help, but it didn’t come easy;


All Regulators Will:

Cut obsolete regulations

Reward results, not red tape

Get out of Washington—create grass

roots partnerships

Negotiate, don’t dictate

February 22, 1995

it took them four weeks, with the help of a bank officer, to fill out a stack of forms,gather all the necessary documentation, and wait for the government’s answer. Lastyear, when they needed another loan to expand, they learned that they qualified foran SBA program, designed by Rodney Martin in SBA, San Antonio office, that pro-vides a fast-track application procedure for loans up to $100,000. The wholeprocess took three days, start to finish—and required only a simple one-page form.That’s quite a change from the earlier 78-page application and 90-day review.Multiply that improvement by all the rest of SBA’s small-loan applications, applythe same math to many of the procedures the other federal agencies engage in everyday, and you begin to get an idea how much can be saved simply by cutting obso-lete regulations and pointless paperwork.

Of course, regulatory reform means more than just cutting. It also meansmaking sure the remaining rules are user-friendly. It means making it easier for busi-nesses, or state and local governments, or individual citizens to do things the feder-al government needs them to do. It means throwing away the hoops people havehad to jump through when they wanted service from their government. And aboveall, it means keeping the government’s eye on the ball—the objectives the laws weredesigned to accomplish.

It’s happening. Consider the Environmental Protection Agency, thenation’s biggest regulator. Sixteen separate laws spell out the agency’s monumen-tal task—to clean up pollution and figure out what needs to be done to protectpeople and the environment in the future. EPA has been enormously successful:the air is cleaner and healthier; you can swim in rivers that once caught fire andin lakes that once were dead; you can drink water and be sure it’s safe; you canfind out whether there are hazards in your neighborhood that may harm you oryour children. But the costs have also been enormous—to the taxpayer and toindustry and small businesses.

The EPA listened to the rising chorus of customer complaints and responded.The agency is rapidly changing the way it regulates, moving from mandatory, puni-tive compliance approaches to voluntary, consensual approaches. In short, insteadof telling businesses what to do to prevent pollution and how to do it, down to thevery last detail, EPA now invites businesses to describe how they think they canmeet the goal and then lets them get on with it. Already, the agency has createdmore than two dozen such voluntary programs in a wide range of industry sectors.Says EPA Administrator Carol Browner, “Our new philosophy at EPA is toughstandards to protect our air, our water, and the health of our people, but commonsense, flexibility, innovation, and creativity in how you meet those standards.”11

That same philosophy—essentially, the philosophy of reinvention—has takenhold in many other agencies as well. There are hundreds of examples throughoutthe government.

For example, ever since the Depression, we’ve been pretty firm about wantingour money protected when we deposit it in the bank. But sometimes the governmenthasn’t made it especially easy for banks to meet that sensible objective. It used to bethat when examiners from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency walked into examine a small bank, they brought along 1,216 pages of arcane technical proce-dures. No longer. Now they bring along a user-friendly 30-page booklet.

37Getting Results

The rules for creating pension plans are currently so cumbersome and costlyto follow that many smaller businesses are unable to afford them for their employ-ees, and some businesses are forced to cut pension programs they already have. Thisis quite the opposite of what policymakers intended. In June, President Clintonannounced an initiative to eliminate and simplify many of the rules governing suchprograms, along with creating a new, simpler IRA-based plan option called theNational Employee Savings Trust, or NEST.

In addition, employers also are required to provide their employees withreports on the financial condition of their pension and welfare benefit plans. So thatpeople reluctant to ask their employers have somewhere else to go, the law alsorequires employers to provide copies to the Department of Labor. But by the timeLabor gets the reports, they’re typically seven months old and, therefore, useless.Now, the department proposes to eliminate the requirement, ending a quarter-mil-lion filings per year and saving employers 150,000 hours of pointless work and $2.5million per year in additional costs. If employees want the information, they will beable to call Labor and the department will request it from the plan administrator onthe spot. It’s just common sense.

Very small companies—those with 10 or fewer employees—make up nearly80 percent of all American businesses. When asked for their number-one complaintabout regulations, small business owners said, “Tax compliance and payroll record-keeping are too complicated.” In response, IRS is building the Simplified Tax andWage Reporting System. When complete, it will let employers file W-2 data to bothfederal and state governments, electronically and simultaneously, saving billions ofdollars for business every year.

Even as the government is reducing the regulatory burdens on its customers,it’s finally also cutting much of its own red tape—the stuff that ties the governmentitself into knots and runs up the cost of governing. For example, it has entirely elim-inated the 10,000-page Federal Personnel Manual—the government’s rule book forhiring and firing. Gone, too, is the notoriously complicated Form 171 that anyoneseeking to work for the government had to fill out. If American industry will acceptyour resume, why shouldn’t your government?


Streamlining Bank Exams

Old ProceduresPage Count: 1216

New ProceduresPage Count: 30

39

The government’s also getting rid of thousands of pages of lengthy and oftenludicrous procurement regulations and product specifications--dozens of pages onhow to make French fries or tell whether fish is fresh, dozens more just to describea camp lantern, and on and on. With the possible exception of late-night talk showhosts who use them from time to time for comic relief, it’s unlikely many peoplewill miss procurement regulations either.

Progress Report: Rewarding Results, Not Red TapeThe old OSHA wasn’t the only agency in the federal government that was

measuring its performance the wrong way. Most agencies did. In fact, when theNational Performance Review examined how agencies measure their workers’ per-formance, it found that fully 30 percent of the measures tracked punitive acts, likelevying fines. Another 50 percent measured were administrative functions, like fill-ing out forms correctly. Only 20 percent of worker performance was measured interms of how well individual employees actually worked with others--and almostnone of that was about working with customers.12

Getting Results

TRUE GRITS

President Clinton, speaking at the White House Conference on Small Business onJune 12, 1995:

I hate to tell you this, folks, but we’re about to lose the regulation thattells us how to test grits. I want you to ask yourself if you can do without this:

Grits, corn grits, hominy grits is the food prepared by so grindingand sifting clean, white corn, with removal of corn bran and germ,that on a moisture-free basis, its crude fiber content is not more than1.2 percent and its fat content is not more than 2.25 percent andwhen tested by the method prescribed in Paragraph (b)(2) of this sec-tion, not less than 95 percent passes through a #10 sieve, but notmore than 20 percent through a #25 sieve . . .

Now here’s the really interesting part; they tell how:

Attach bottom pan to a #25 sieve. Fit the #10 sieve into the #25sieve. Pour 100 grams of sample into the #10 sieve, attach cover, andhold assembly in a slightly inclined position, shake the sieves by strik-ing the sides against one hand with an upward stroke, at the rate ofabout 150 times per minute. Turn the sieve about one-sixth of a revo-lution, each time in the same direction, after each 25 strokes. . . . Thepercent of sample passing through a #10 sieve shall be determined bysubtracting from 100 percent the percent remaining in the #10 sieve.The percent of material in the pan shall be considered as the percentpassing through the #25 sieve.*

I don’t know if we can do without that. There is some real sacrifice here;I am personally going to miss the 2,700-word specifications for french fries.

*21 CFR Sec. 137.230.


The study concluded agencies were measuring the wrong things. They weremeasuring inputs, not outcomes. In some cases, that was because agency or programmissions were fuzzy to begin with. More often, however, the problem was that agen-cies had gotten so caught up in measuring inputs, they forgot what they were inbusiness to accomplish in the first place.

Take the U.S. Coast Guard. The Coast Guard is responsible for, among otherthings, promoting safety on the high seas. For years it focused on inspecting thecondition of vessels and levying fines whenever it found things weren’t shipshape.The more fines, the better it was doing. The problem is, however, that faulty shipsdon’t usually cause accidents—people do.

Today, the Coast Guard has shifted its attention from finding rust spots toreducing injuries and fatalities. It’s also re-examined its assumptions. The CoastGuard had determined that its highest priority should be commercial fishing, anindustry long known for its high injury rate. But when it actually looked at theentire industry, it found that the injury and fatality rate in the area of commercialtowing—tugs and barges—was equally high and needed attention. By focusing onits mission and consulting with the industry itself, the agency achieved dramaticresults: fatality rates declined from 91 per 100,000 industry employees in 1990 toonly 36 per 100,000 last year—nearly a two-thirds reduction. When you’re mea-suring what matters, nothing matters more than lives.

As President Clinton has noted, “If the government rewards writing citationsand levying fines more than safety, then there’s a good chance that what you get is

more citations, more fines, and no more safety.”13 And ifwhat you measure is red tape, you get more red tape.The combination of the reinvention initiative’s empha-sis on results and the passage of the GovernmentPerformance and Results Act of 1993 is turning scoresof federal agencies away from procedure and towardperformance—serving people better and, at the sametime, reducing the cost of government.

This new law ordered agencies to spell out theirperformance goals clearly and succinctly, make specific

commitments for meeting them, and establish formal outcome measurement sys-tems to demonstrate their progress. The law also called for the immediate creationof at least ten “pilot projects.” To everyone’s astonishment, 27 agencies volunteered,including the Defense Logistics Agency, the Coast Guard, the U.S. Mint, SBA, theNational Highway Traffic Safety Administration, USDA’s Farmers HomeAdministration, major programs in the Department of Energy, and the Departmentof Housing and Urban Development. These agencies, and many others, createdmore than 70 pilot projects, which are now in the vanguard of reinvention.

One of the first pilots was the Internal Revenue Service, an agency that madea comprehensive commitment to performance improvement. The vast majority ofAmericans are willing to pay our fair share of taxes, so long as the process of meet-ing our obligation is as painless as possible. To make it so, the agency has establisheda strategic plan with measurable, customer-driven outcomes that, as of this year, are

If the government rewards writing citations and levying fines more than safety, then there’s agood chance that what you get is more citations,

more fines, and no more safety.President ClintonJanuary 24, 1995

41

directly linked to the performance evaluations of executives and managers through-out the organization. The concept is simple: if employees are measured by how wellthey serve their customers, their customers will be well-served.

The Agriculture Department, the SBA, Social Security, and HUD, amongother agencies, also have begun evaluating employee performance on the basis ofexplicit, customer-driven outcomes. The Department of Education’s new perfor-mance appraisal system even has a mechanism for incorporating customer feedbackinto employee evaluations—a process that has the blessings of the agency’s labor-management council.

Progress Report: Getting Out of Washington, Creating PartnershipsJoy Lucas came home to Oregon from Germany last year with two small chil-

dren, a divorce from her soldier husband, and ambition.14 But with no work expe-rience and no job skills, her options would have been limited—had it not been forthe “Oregon Option,” a performance-based partnership contract between federaland state agencies that does something states have been craving for years. It consol-idates narrow, inflexible federal funding programs and waives the rules that governthem so they can be merged with state funds and turned into real services for realpeople in real need.

Joy Lucas has never heard of the Oregon Option. Nor has she heard ofOregon Benchmarks, that state’s landmark effort to set goals for government ser-vices and hold agencies accountable for achieving them—perhaps the main reasonthe federal government agreed to the Oregon Option. She doesn’t need to knowabout either one; that’s the point. They’re invisible to her and should stay that way.Instead of having to navigate the unmapped territory of federal and state categori-cal programs herself, filling out form after form in agency after agency, she can sim-ply get what she needs—in this case, the training to become a 911 emergency dis-patcher and the interim support she needs for herself and her children until shelands the job.

The Oregon Option is just one example of the benefits of “getting out ofWashington”—that is, of sitting down with customers and developing partnershipagreements for reaching common goals quickly and less expensively. In the last yearor two, other examples have developed throughout the federal government. Manyinvolve partnerships between Washington and the states designed to consolidatefunding streams, eliminate overlapping authorities, create incentives for achievingconcrete results, and reduce the innovation-sapping micromanagement that has sooften characterized federal grant programs in the past.

In his 1996 budget, President Clinton has proposed that 271 separate pro-grams be consolidated into 27. In the welfare program, 34 states have been grantedwaivers from federal micromanagement because their programs address the job ofreducing welfare dependency more effectively, more flexibly, and in some casesmore innovatively than uniform federal rules would have allowed. In addition, tenstates have been granted Medicaid waivers. And, under the education flexibilitypartnerships, Oregon and several other states are receiving waivers from federalstatutory and regulatory rules in education.

Getting Results

President Clinton andVice President Gore repeat-edly praised the “Oregoninitiative” on Tuesday.

Just what is that?Actually, it’s the “OregonOption,” and it’s the termtop government officialshave given to efforts to snipthe strands of bureaucraticred tape.

The arrangement madeits formal debut in Oregonlate last year as part of aGore-led effort to streamlinegovernment and cut costs.

The Oregon Option,signed by Gore inDecember 1994, allows thestate to negotiate deals withfederal agencies to receivegrants free of the usual reg-ulations and detailed paper-work. To receive the lessencumbered federal cash,the state must demonstrateit is using the money toachieve a variety of goals,or benchmarks.

Already, the state is tak-ing advantage of the optionto coordinate grants andassociated paperwork forsuch programs as children’shealth care, welfare, andjob training. Some of theservices, such as childhoodimmunization, already are inoperation.

State officials claim thenew approach will savegovernment —and taxpay-ers—millions of dollars.Clinton and Gore say: Goodjob, and don’t forget thepart we played.

—Gail Kinsey Hill

The Oregonian, June 28, 1995

Copyright © 1995 Oregonian Publishing Co.

OREGON OPTION


In a similar vein, the Community Empowerment Board, comprising 15 fed-eral agencies, has helped the agencies provide waivers of federal job training, com-munity development, and various “safety net” rules for 95 Enterprise Communitiesand nine Empowerment Zones—created last year to enable communities to cus-tom-craft programs that meet their particular needs. The difference between suchwaivers and simple block grants is that the waivers require the development of com-prehensive community plans and results-based measurement systems; they alsoensure accountability for taxpayers’ money.

The EPA has undertaken several new partnerships with state and local gov-ernments. For instance, many communities have hesitated to redevelop inner-citysites and put them to safe, productive use again, for fear they will be held liableunder Superfund legislation for past industrial contamination. The new “brown-fields” initiative lifts the threat of liability; that program has awarded five pilot pro-jects, and 50 more are planned. EPA has also limited the liability of the operatorsof municipal solid waste landfills and removed 25,000 sites that had been tracked

by Superfund but that either had no contamination or were being fullyaddressed by state clean-up programs. Developers wouldn’t touch thosesites as long as they were still on the tracking list.

Government is creating performance partnerships not only withstate and local governments, but also with industry.

Pretend for a moment you’re a factory owner in Texas. Plentyof your workers are Mexican citizens. They are here legally--

they’ve got papers. Then one afternoon Immigration andNaturalization Service agents surround the building, burst in thedoor, inform you that the papers for half your workforce arefraudulent, then arrest them and haul them away. And you’releft stranded. No workers, no work. No work, no income.You’re in deep trouble.

That happens all the time in the Southwest—or atleast it did, until Neil Jacobs, INS assistant district direc-

tor in Dallas, decided he was getting nowhere. Theworkers just showed up someplace else a few days later,with more fake papers. Meanwhile, he was hurting the

people the area needed most: its employers. Workingin partnership with employers, local enforcementofficials, and employment services, Jacobs created

“Operation Jobs.” Now INS meets quietly withemployers and connects them with documentedworkers (at the same wage levels) before they

remove the undocumented workers. Not only doesthis change eliminate the disruption of the old approach,

it ensures there are no empty slots for the undocumented workers tore-occupy later. And it creates a solid market for legal workers—more than 2,500

of them in north Texas alone, and thousands more now that Jacobs’ project hasexpanded to neighboring states.

Technology,

new attitude

help Customs

BY JAMES J. MITCHELL

Business Editor

WHEN my wife and I recently

returned from overseas though San

Francisco International Airport for

the first time in a year, we were surprised by the

change in the U.S. Customs Service.

In the past, agents seemed to wait listlessly at

their stations and be in no hurry to examine

passports and luggage.

This time several agents were out among

arriving passengers, guiding them energetically

to the shortest lines. These moved rapidly and

presto, we were out the door within minutes.

San Jose Mercury News, July 21, 1995. Reprinted with permission.

43Getting Results

On a larger scale, EPA’s doing the same kind of thing: developing workingpartnerships with industry and others to achieve environmental goals. Here are justfour of the several dozen EPA initiatives already underway:

• “Green Lights,” through which more than 1,500 companies have put inenergy-saving lighting throughout their installations (American Express inNew York is saving more than a quarter-million dollars annually in energycosts and has received nearly a half- million dollars in rebates fromCommonwealth Edison);

• “Waste Wise,” which has encouraged more than 400 major industries togenerate less solid waste (NYNEX, the northeast telecommunicationsgiant, is saving $6 million a year);

• “Climate Wise,” a joint EPA-Department of Energy effort, which helpsindustry decrease energy use, prevent pollution, and reduce greenhousegases—while increasing profits (DuPont, for example, aims at reducinggreenhouse gases by 40 percent by 2000, for a savings of $31 million annu-ally); and

• The “Pesticide Environmental Stewardship Program,” in which EPA, theDepartment of Agriculture, and the Food and Drug Administration joinnearly two dozen industry and commodity production organizations todevelop methods for reducing pesticide use and risk.

Another intriguing EPA partnership experiment is “Project XL,” by which theagency, working with states, enables individual companies to develop their ownways to improve the environment. Partners will be allowed to replace currentrequirements with alternative, company-developed controls so long as they performbetter than current laws and regulations, permit citizens to examine assumptionsand track progress, ensure worker safety and environmental justice, are supportedby the community, and are enforceable.

Government-industry partnerships like these continue to grow. For example,the Customs Service has involved business in its own efforts to reinvent itself.

Customs was established in 1789, by the second act of the new Congress, tocollect revenue for the new nation—a nation that, even then, had a substantial debt.Customs paid for the Revolutionary War. It paid for the Louisiana Purchase. In fact,it was the major source of revenue for the U.S. Treasury until the early 1900s, whenincome taxes were created. Customs officials met every incoming ship, supervisedunloading, inspected cargo, established duties, and established a written record ofevery transaction. More than two centuries later, they still did.

In the meantime, both the traffic and the shipping-related problems (drugs,contraband, firearms, diseases) skyrocketed. And so did the paperwork. Forms gotlonger and longer, inspections more and more complex, and delays reached intoler-able levels. Combine this with a measurement system that cared more about howmany shipments were detained than about how many were cleared, and you have arecipe for chaos, frustration, anger. Finally, Customs itself got fed up. The result wasthe Customs Modernization and Informed Compliance Act, signed just monthsafter President Clinton announced the reinvention initiative.


SOME COST SAVINGS TO THE PRIVATE SECTORFROM REGULATORY REINVENTIONS

Private businesses, taxpayers, and consumers will save nearly $28 billionas a result of hundreds of changes to regulatory and administrative activi-ties that will reduce burden or allow alternative approaches to achievingnational goals. For example, agencies will:

• Eliminate the Physician Attestation Form. Savings: 200,000burden hours on doctors and $22,500 per hospital from nolonger filing 11 million of these forms.

• Implement effluent trading on a national scale as a cost-effectiveapproach for reducing water pollution. Savings: at least $1.2billion, and possibly as much as $15 billion a year.

• Reduce existing monitoring, recordkeeping, and reportingburdens by at least 25 percent. Savings: 20 million burden hoursfor employers.

• Revise PCB disposal regulations to allow less expensive disposalmethods. Savings: $4 billion a year.

• Streamline the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act’scorrective action procedures. Savings: $4 billion a year.

• Streamline the alien labor certification process by decentralizingauthority to state employment agencies and automating formprocessing. Savings: $223.8 million over five years.

• Simplify pension computation procedures by relying onemployer calculations and simplifying methods of dealing withcomplex plan provisions. Savings: $6.3 million over five years.

• Streamline affirmative action plans for federal contractors.Savings: 4.8 million hours of contractor time annually.

• Relieve duplicate filing burden on employers. Three federalagencies—IRS, Labor, and Social Security—have agreed to work together to eliminate duplicate tax data filing requirementson businesses and taxpayers. Savings: $1 billion a year in timespent by employers.

• Expand federal-state tax partnerships to eliminate duplicative taxrequirements and allow a single filing. Savings: $1.5 billion inreduced burden on taxpayers.

45Getting Results

Customs met with shippers all over the country and designed a new auto-mated system for handling shipments—a system so simple that most cargo is nowcleared before it is even unloaded. Information is collected monthly instead oftransaction-by-transaction, and companies have just one Customs account, ratherthan one for every port through which their shipments pass. (One Miami compa-ny used to file some 700,000 forms every year; now it files one per month.15) In themeantime, Customs is in the process of clearing out most of its current regulationsand designing new ones, with the help of shippers themselves. Despite the need tocompletely overhaul their own procedures, businesses are delighted. Time is money;their objective is to move cargo. Now that’s Customs’ objective too. The bonus isthat voluntary compliance with Customs duties and apprehension of violators areincreasing as well.

Progress Report: Negotiating, Not DictatingWhen government representatives “get out of Washington,” meet with cus-

tomers and front-line employees, and start addressing problems on the ground—not in the rarefied air of the Capital—understanding grows. With understandingcomes trust, and a willingness to arrive at agreements jointly, without the interven-tion of enforcers and lawyers. It’s common sense. It’s also a world away from the“Decide-Announce-Defend” approach the government has used for years. As PhilipHoward explains, “Sensible results come out of discussion and negotiation, notfrom seizing technicalities and parsing legal language to achieve a victory.”16

Some agencies have been moving toward regulatory negotiation for a fewyears. EPA has conducted 16 negotiated rule-setting programs in the last ten years.USDA and the Department of Transportation have also used “reg-negs,” as they’recalled. Agencies like OSHA and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission are usingonline computer systems to give as wide a range of customers as possible an easyway to comment on proposed rules. This year, as part of President Clinton’s 100-day governmentwide regulatory reform initiative, agencies identified more than 40high-visibility issues that were ripe for negotiated rulemaking.

EPA has gone even farther: its “Common Sense Initiative”—a dramaticdeparture from its old “command and control” way of operating—has broughttogether teams of industry representatives, labor, environmental groups, communi-ty organizations, and government officials at every level to find ways to changecomplicated, inconsistent, and costly regulations. Even more unusual, it focuses onsix specific industries: auto manufacturing, computers and electronics, iron andsteel, metal finishing, petroleum refining, and printing. Under the new initiative,“We’re taking all the regulations that relate to the individual industry and puttingthem on the table,” EPA Administrator Carol Browner says. “We’re going to seek thebest way for that industry to meet environmental standards to ensure clean waterand clean air.”17

Ask industry how it should be regulated? Who else knows the problems, andthe potential solutions, better? So long as the government establishes standards thatprotect the public, why not let the industries and other affected stakeholders helpfigure out how best to get there? Government, industry, and the public share a com-


mon goal—a cleaner environment at less cost to taxpayers and businesses. Thestakeholder groups are looking for common sense approaches to regulation, pollu-tion prevention, reporting, compliance, permitting, and technology. The principlesof this new partnership are to seek consensus on how to reach the goal, focus onprevention, develop industry-specific solutions rather than trying, as Browner says,to make “one size fit all,” and maintain tough standards.

In a way, it’s borrowing an idea from the past. As General George S. Pattonsaid, “Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do, and they will sur-prise you with their ingenuity.”18

The Road AheadAs Newsweek magazine pointed out this year, in the old federal government

the theory was that if you just stipulated every possible regulatory circumstance, arobotic army of inspectors could go out and enforce the rules.19 The trouble is, cir-cumstances differ, conditions change, life goes on. And the government went ontoo, but with the same inflexible, red tape-tangled procedures it had always used—in some cases, since the beginning of the Republic.

There’s an old saying: “If we keep on doing what we’re doing, we’re gonnakeep on getting what we’ve got.” Americans don’t want “what we’ve got” anymore.We want a government that delivers results, that keeps up with change and actual-ly helps people, businesses, and state and local governments adapt to those changes.We want, in fact, an enterprising government, one that moves as quickly as the restof our society, one that works with us, listens to us, and acts on the things we needin a more efficient, more effective, and less costly manner than it has in the past.

And that’s what we’re beginning to get. Agencies that treat their customers aspartners. That cut rules long out-of-date and make those we still need sensible. Thatseek to find ways to achieve public goals without damaging the structure of privateenterprise that supports us. That remember that the purpose is progress towardthose goals, not punishment for those who violate—often unwittingly—rules thatare obscure or pointless. And that reward their own employees for doing the rightthing, not simply for doing things right according to the rulebook.

As The New York Times said, it is a “quiet revolution.”20 But revolutions taketime, and no one is suggesting the government’s got the problems all licked. Thereis progress, but there is a great deal that remains to be done—and indeed, it is neverfinished. New laws get passed. New regulations get written. The government’s taskis to ensure that those rules are clear about what needs to be accomplished, but flex-ible about how.

What government reinvention does is reinstate the promise of common sensein self-government. President Clinton has already described the result: “a govern-ment that is limited but effective… that does better what it should do and simplystops doing things it shouldn’t be doing in the first place, that protects consumers,workers, and the environment without burdening business, choking innovation, orwasting the money of the American taxpayer.”21

Getting Results 47

Notes 1. Franklin D. Roosevelt, speech at Oglethorpe University, Atlanta,

Georgia, May 22, 1932.

2. Dan Margolies and Bonar Menninger, “OSHA’s Obsessions TrivializeHazards,” Kansas City Business Journal, reprint report, December 1994, p. 13.

3. Joseph A. Dear, Application #484 for the Ford Foundation’s InnovationsIn American Government 1995 Awards Program.

4. Bill Clinton, remarks at Regulatory Reform event, Old Executive OfficeBuilding, Washington, D.C., February 21, 1995.

5. Bill Clinton, remarks at Reinventing Government event on regulatoryburden reduction, U.S. Department of the Treasury, Washington, D.C., June 9, 1995.

6. Philip K. Howard, The Death of Common Sense: How the Law isSuffocating America (New York: Random House, 1995), p. 7.

7. Margolies and Menninger, p. 2.

8. Howard, p. 175.

9. Howard, p. 186.

10. Arthur Levitt, Jr., speech to the Society of American Business Editorsand Writers, May 1, 1995.

11. Carol Browner, Administrator, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency,press briefing on regulatory reform, May 16, 1995.

12. Unpublished National Performance Review survey, 1995.

13. Bill Clinton, remarks on reinventing worker safety at OSHA event,Stromberg Metal Works, Inc., Washington, D.C., May 16, 1995.

14. John Goshko, “To Cut Red Tape, Oregon Experiments with FederalAid,” Washington Post, August 6, 1995.

15. Joe Klein, “The Birth of Common Sense,” Newsweek, March 27, 1995, p. 31.

16. Howard, p. 179.

17. Margolies and Menninger, p. 7.

18. George S. Patton, War As I Knew It (1947).

19. Klein, p. 31.

20. Robert Pear, “A Welfare Revolution Hits Home, But Quietly,” The NewYork Times, August 13, 1995, p. 4-1.

21. Bill Clinton, remarks at Reinventing Government event, Custom Print,Arlington, Virginia, March 16, 1995.

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